That is a dubious claim. While links between HPV and cervical cancer are quite strong and well-defined, the associations with the other viruses you cite are only correlative. Also, Hep C, HIV and herpes have no vaccine, so unclear what your statement is referring to anyway? What has contributed to a drop in cancer mortality would be advances in treatment (like targeted therapies and immunoncology), better image/blood/genetic screening practices, and certainly the decreased popularity of smoking.
This particular virus has a solid link to various forms of cancer:
"[Epstein–Barr virus] has also been implicated in several other diseases, including Burkitt's lymphoma, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, Hodgkin's lymphoma, stomach cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, multiple sclerosis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis.".
The word "implicated" in science normally means "correlated with" and can't really be considered a "solid link".
Some of the articles cited in that section have sentences like "1 out 2 (50%) adult analyzed cases was positive, with 50% of stained tumor cells (this patient was a 22 years old female, coming from Napoli);" that don't follow the necessary standard of evidence. I continued to skim the linked articles and they are all clearly correlative.
It's a lot more subtle than that. First off let me say that historically, demonstrating that a virus causes cancer has been a major bit of work, and many times people have mistakenly seen associations and falsely believed they were causal. second, I don't deny there are some cancers which are caused by viruses. But, you're referencing extremely rare cancers, not the cancers that make up the bulk of US (or world) deaths from cancer. My complaint is about taking these relatively rare situations and implying there's some sort of general underlying well-understood cause, when the reality is, in many situations, the virus itself did not specifically "cause" the cancer, but for complex biological reasons, it's "associated" with the cancer (which could manifest as increased susceptibility to getting particular types, or worse prognosis, or even possibly better outcome).
> While links between HPV and cervical cancer are quite strong and well-defined, the associations with the other viruses you cite are only correlative.
HPV is merely correlative, as well. That's basically how all endogenous cancers work. With Epstein-Barr Virus the association is quite strong, though the incidence of EBV-induced cancers doesn't seem to be quite as large as HPV--~1% vs 2-3%.
HPV isn't correlative, it's causative. Additional co-transformation factors may be required, but it is well understood that E6 and E7 proteins directly lead to tumorigenesis. EBV pathogenic mechanisms are more autocrine and therefore a muddier picture, hence correlative.
> Also, Hep C, HIV and herpes have no vaccine, so unclear what your statement is referring to anyway?
OP is talking about more vaccines as possible future mitigations - more vaccines as in new vaccines, not more vaccinations using existing ones (though that wouldn't hurt either.)
Yes, many did feel that way and you can hear this for yourself in a small part of the documentary “Summer of Soul” by Questlove. In the film they show archival footage shot at the Harlem Culture Festival on the day of the Apollo 11 landing. The interviewees are resoundly unimpressed with the achievement. They cite the expense of the program, especially in lieu of the lacking services and dire maintenance of Harlem, NYC as a key reason for their lack of support.
Here's a classic letter by Ernst Stuhlinger to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration:
It seems telling that the most concrete example he gives for the value of human space flight is the usefulness of unmanned satellites.
Simplistically it's true that whenever you spend money on some effort there's going to be some benefit. Paying NASA scientists to dig ditches would have some benefit in stimulating the economy, even if it doesn't offset the costs (material and opportunity). Would it be the best use of resources, however?
Whenever I go down the rabbit hole of "spinoff technologies," I find a lot of it to be a gish gallop of stuff, much of which is overstated. There's a reason why you hear NASA talking up pioneering research done on Alzheimer's at the international space station, but you don't read Alzheimer's researchers talking about breakthroughs coming from the ISS.
Still, there are a lot of important technology that NASA has been involved with. But when you look into most of it, the connection to human spaceflight is tangential at best, and often completely non-existent (NASA does a lot of stuff outside of human spaceflight).
The kernel of the argument is accurate - scientific research can be important even if it doesn't provide immediate dividends. But too often people misuse that to argue that no amount of money is poorly spent. It's precisely because scientific research is important that we need to carefully consider the return on different projects, and make sure that the funds that are being allocated are well spent.
Honestly I think all the side-effect technologies are just marketing. The true goal of space exploration is and should be to turn us into an interplanetary and eventually interstellar species. Yes we don't have the tech to do all of that just yet, and maybe some new physics is required, but just as Cathedrals were intentionally built over centuries we should intentionally build out the capability to the best of our abilities. Not only is it essential to our long-term survival as a species, it would provide a cultural release valve just like the old frontier, only this time no natives to worry about.
I highly doubt much if any of the space exploration now is going to have a significant impact on humans being an interplanetary or interstellar species. A good analog might be the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. It was interesting, but it Amundsen's expedition never left we'd be in the exact same place we are now when it comes to exploring Antarctica.
If 200 years ago a country had decided to keep a settlement going at the top of Mount Everest in the name of progress, it wouldn't have been any benefit to the modern efforts to keep people in the ISS. Likewise, I don't expect the ISS to have any noticeable impact on efforts to have people live on other planets.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean we won't make progress. A lot of people are excited about what SpaceX has been doing, and until very recently they've been entirely involved in non-human cargo. There are a lot of reasons to send things into space, which is why we send up a lot of stuff. There's just not many reasons to send people up at the moment, other than to be able to say we're sending people up.
We have to start somewhere, and private industry isn't going to start it because, as you point out, there's not many reasons to do it at the moment. The ISS is allowing us to experiment with living in orbit for extended periods. We certainly have to master those relatively simple conditions before attempting to survive a manned trip to Mars or living on the Moon.
Also SpaceX wouldn't exist without the ISS. It's NASA contracts for resupplying the ISS that kept it alive in the early days. Which just goes to prove the model: Government invests in "useless" project that allows private industry the toe-hold of capital needed to kickstart a new technology.
To your Antarctic exploration analogy, I'd say the ISS is more equivalent to McMurdo station than the Amundsen expedition
In 2012, William Doino Jr, wrote that "The remarkable thing about Hell's Angel is that it purports to defend the poor against Mother Teresa's supposed exploitation of them, while never actually interviewing any on screen. Not a single person cared for by the Missionaries speaks on camera. Was this because they had a far higher opinion of Blessed Teresa than Hitchens would permit in his film? Avoiding the people at the heart of Teresa's ministry, Hitchens posed for the camera and let roll a series of ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, as uninformed as they were cruel."
I afraid we stray from the topic, but yes, i'm not either one for Hitchen's obvious ideology-based vendetta against Catholicism in general and Mother Teresa in particular. Having witnessed first hand the Sisters of Mercy at work in rural Africa where no-one except these proselytes of Mother Teresa thought it worthwhile to take in orphans, lepers, old people without relatives and give them food, shelter, life in fact. Not an atheist in sight.
It's laughable that Mother Teresa's critics try to disparage her by contrasting the care of her organization vs. that of a western hospital. The reality of the situation was that you either passed away in a soft bed with someone by your side or alone on the side of the curb. I know which one I would prefer
Could this post be designed to provoke a reaction that might lead to (or contribute to pre-existing) FTC anti-trust inquiries about Google's practices?
The only thing is that this isn't anti-trust. If you want to use a google product, then you have to follow the google rules. I think the rules are a bit ridiculous, but YouTube doesn't have a monopoly on online videos. Well, except maybe cat videos.. so there might be a case in there somewhere. No app or company has a "right" to create Youtube apps. For anti-trust, one would have to prove a monopoly and they would be difficult despite the ubiquitousness of Youtube.
Also, Google isn't preventing Microsoft from creating a Youtube app, they are only requiring that it meet certain requirements. Since Microsoft is a direct competitor in the search (and therefore advertising) space, it's not unfounded that Google do what they're doing.
I personally think it's crap, however Microsoft brought this on themselves by blatantly violating the Terms of Service.
However, when all is said and done, Microsoft deserves it -- they are, after all responsible for Internet Explorer and while it isn't related to Youtube, they deserve to suffer for all of the hours and hours developers have spent trying to make their products compatible with that hell-demon of a browser.
I'm not so sure. You don't have to prove a monopoly. You have to show a selective targeting of a competitor. Manufacturer's using Google as a search engine allegedly have a different set of standards for their YouTube app than manufacturer's that don't use Google as search default. Whether or not that's how things actually transpired, it sure smells awfully fishy to an FTC regulator. This isn't about following rules or APIs, it's about provoking regulatory authorities to investigate Google so they maneuver more conservatively. And watch, now that Windows app will be approved post haste!
You actually do have to show a monopoly. A monopoly is prohibited from doing certain things that would be perfectly legitimate if a smaller competitor did it.
Example 1: The EU required Microsoft to offer a version of Windows with a browser choice screen. However, Apple does not have to offer an alternative to Safari. Reason: Windows was a monopoly, but Mac OS X wasn't.
Example 2: The EU permitted Windows Phone and Windows RT to default to IE, without offering a choice of other browsers. Reason: Windows Phone does not have a monopoly of the smartphone market, and Windows RT does not have a monopoly of the tablet market.
According to http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/video-websites YouTube gets 450,000,000 uniques against NetFlix who get 55,000,000. I'd argue there different markets and the key comparable would be dailymotion at 27,000,000. I think there is a good chance it'd pass the monopoly test.
The lead that Youtube has over Dailymotion is enormous. It's higher than the ratio of PCs to Macs at the time of the Microsoft antitrust case.
(Which is why the DOJ defined the market as the one for x86 PC operating systems. That excluded Mac OS from being considered a competitor to Windows, as it ran only on PowerPC at the time.)
